Why the West Doesn’t Wet Grind. Update
The question, posed by Ken Albala. Why doesn’t the “West” grind wet? That is why didn’t they soak or boil grains before they ground them?
As a preliminary I would say that they would certainly have tried it. If you look back at the past, everything that could be done to grains was: toasting, sprouting, soaking, boiling, adding alkali (and doubtless acids too), pounding, grinding, doing these things in diverse orders, fermenting the result, shaping the result.
Second preliminary. People were very, very picky and knowledgeable about the result. If you depend on grain (bread, tortillas, boiled rice, etc etc) for 80% of your calories you become a connoisseur of grain products. We simply don’t match that knowledge.
Third preliminary. Grinding and pounding sound simple but they were very sophisticated operations with dozens of variants depending on the species of grain, the variety of the species chosen, the age of the grain, the type of grindstone (dozens of shapes and materials of lateral grindstones alone) and the preliminary treatment of the grain before you started.
Fourth preliminary. Our vocabulary is ridiculously restricted. How many of us today can snap our fingers and explain the difference between meal and groats and grits and flour and grist and a whole complex vocabulary that varied from place to place and grain to grain. Just the word bread covers a world of products and that’s only the beginning.
Fifth preliminary. This may all seem just too nerdy for words. But the fate of whole societies depended on how they ground. Few things have had greater impact on the course of history.
Ken (his photo) tried soaking barley for a few days.
As Leni Sorensen and Adam Balic in the comments both point out, this will begin changing some of the starch to sugar, resulting in a sweeter result. Here’s Leni’s description.
I have ground sprouted red wheat berries on my big Mexican matate – not the easiest – so I now resort to the food processor. Sprouted wheat with a two day tail makes a sweet sticky paste. I use it in my yeast bread but it also makes a great addition to flat breads and crackers. Yum!
Then Ken (his photo) pounded the barley in a large mortar for twenty minutes.
Ken’s description.
It was an odd red prairie barley I picked up at Corti Brothers in Sacramento, meant to be cooked like rice. So I have no idea how old, how far prepared or anything. They were not pearled like barley you buy for soup. More like a whole grain. And after pounding (just soaked, not cooked) it was a coarse dough. Which only really held together well after I added ground dry flour. SO maybe that’s why there’s not wet milling. You need dry flour too.
Ken didn’t photograph the final result but I suspect it was nothing like as finely divided as a ground grain dish would be. And the hull (the tight seed coat) is not going to be broken into fine particles by pounding. Shearing does a much better job than pounding at breaking up the seed coat and reducing the interior to tiny particles.
Here’s my tentative summary of the situation.
So Ken pounded not sheared in your mortar. That is quicker and easier than shearing because you can use the weight of arm plus pestle. But as the photo shows it does not produce flour just smashed… grains.
To get either smooth masa or a fine flour (not a very coarse meal) you have to shear. Shearing is almost impossible in a pestle and mortar if you want to produce flour in quantity because you are turning your wrist, tiring and not very forceful.
Maize nixtamalized can be ground to a smooth masa but only on a lateral grindstone, not a rotary one. You use the weight of the body.
Dry maize, wheat, barley etc can be ground to a smooth flour on a lateral (body weight at work, usually though not always) or a rotary grindstone (weight of the upper stone doing the work).
Wet wheat, barley etc (and I think wet, unnixtamalized maize) can be ground to a paste on a lateral grindstone but only with difficulty (thanks Leni).
Wet rice can be ground to a slurry (but not a paste) on a rotary grindstone (thanks Adam). Pastes gum up rotary grindstones (which is why in Mexico there were two kinds of grinding, water mills for wheat and lateral grindstones for wet maize).
Wet or dry grains can be broken or flaked by pounding with a pestle and mortar.
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A couple more thoughts.
1. Flour is pretty perishable which is why grains were stored whole, not as flour. But wet pastes (masa) are much, much more perishable. They don’t keep from one day to the next. You have to have powerful reasons to want to grind wet.
2. Flour can be sifted through a cloth to remove all of part of the bran (the broken up seed coat). This can’t be done with a paste (the coat of maize is rubbed off before grinding wet, having been broken up by the alkali used in nixtamalization). Since people have always preferred finer, whiter breads, this was another advantage to flour.
I’m not sure where this fits into the discussion, other than to suggest that if one were willing to take wet-grinding wheat or other (not-rice) grains a few additional steps then the result could be a smooth dough.
Here’s how rice is wet-ground in Cambodia to make num ban-chok, which are fermented rice vermicelli. The ground liquidy rice is weighted and left to drain during which time it also begins to ferment. Then it’s pounded and kneaded. The result is a satiny smooth dough that, right before it’s made into needles, is worked into an almost fluffy texture.
I’ve no grinding stone and I’m not a baker but it makes me wonder what sort of bread wheat or barley or whatnot wet-ground and then pounded this way might produce. Especially since the weighting/draining ferments the dough at the same time.
Part I:
http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2008/08/about-eight-hou.html
Part II:
http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2008/08/num-banh-chok-r.html
Erm, that’s “noodles” not “needles”!
Rachel this is great. The short life of wet-ground grain is such an important point. Food storage/spoilage issues constrain and compel so many decisions in a basic subsistence situation.
In northern Laos I’ve seen Tai Lue women grinding soaked rice to make the dough for fresh rice noodles. It is more of a slurry than a dough, as you point out, and then the batter (perhaps that’s the word to use) is poured onto metal sheets/pans and steamed into noodle sheets (that are then briefly hung on dowels, like sheets of fresh latex rubber, to dry a little).
ANother processing is a blend of wet and dry: bulgur is made by pounding soaked wheat berries, but it results in flakes rather than flour…. Kurds in southern Turkey still do it in giant mortars using huge mallets as pestles to pound with.
To Naomi and Robyn both. Thanks for the great comments. The batters go back to the discussion of seared pastries of a couple of weeks ago. I hope to comment properly in a later post. Right now I have to work!
http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/08/grinding-in-south-korea-and-some-great-photos.html
Remember our discussion about wet grinding in Korea?
“The batters go back to the discussion of seared pastries of a couple of weeks ago.”
I have no idea how significant this is, but wet grinding societies food cultures seem to overwhelmingly use griddles or steaming to cook the doughs or batters, rather than ovens.
Oh my goodness, Susan, I had forgotten this. Information overload. But you are so right, it is very relevant indeed. Creeping closer to an understanding of the ever interesting question of grain cookery. So central to the whole of world history.
Not sure about this as large parts of the UK were completely dominated by griddle/bakestone cookery, using a wide range of grains. The mixtures that were cooked ranged from firm doughs to loose batters. No wet grinding involved.
In some cases the wet grinding of a rice batter is only the first part in the process. I’ve seen rice noodles being made in Vietnam, where after the initial grinding step the batter is pounded over and over again until it forms a firm satiny dough, this is then made into noodles.
In Southern India there is another multi-step process for making noodles from wet ground rice grain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevai
interesting question, and the bulgur sprang immediately to mind, but bulgur is cracked dry, before the soaking.
I suppose soaking experiments in the ‘Old World” led to a totally different product.
If you soak sprouted grain… you get beer!(or ale, better)
Nice to hear from you again, Nick. Yes, Ken was part way to making beer. Interestingly I don’t know of sprouted maize recipes. One day I have visions of a huge chart of grain techniques. Actually cereal scientists probably already have it.
I don’t know if I missed it, but why isn’t nutritional value of the process mentioned?
Nixtamalization obviously improves the nutritional value of maize significantly. My understanding is that this isn’t nutritionally necessary for the grains that were traditionally used in and around Europe.
Why would you give up the time and energy the more complex wet process adds, along with taking on a more perishable product, if there wasn’t significant benefit in doing so?
The question, it seems, shouldn’t be why the “west” didn’t wet grind, but why some cultures do with things like rice.
I don’t think that will work, Nick. We know that nixtamalization improves the nutritional value. That was only discovered in the second half of the twentieth century, however, by which time nixtamalizing had been going on for about 2000 years.
I have always assumed that the tangible benefit was that with nixtamal you can make a flexible flatbread that can serve as plate, spoon, etc as well tasting good. If I remember right, some archaeologist suggest that it was a fast food for the labor force at Teotihuacan. I suppose it was faster than tamales which must count as an archetypal slow food.
I’m not saying they scientifically understood it. But cultures have a way of coming to the same end result, often, without the benefit of science or a scientific understanding. Hell, even animals do. Every species makes nutritional choices about food without having the benefit of a nutritionist among their flock. ;-)
You could add extra layers if you want — hypothesize about how using nixtamal would be part of a type of natural selection, those groups not using it suffering and those using it thriving, eg.
I don’t know. I’d need to look at the evidence. But it seems at least plausible just to say that nixtamal is a nutritional benefit and so it was advantageous for a culture to expend the effort on it. How they understood that advantage would be interesting, but not necessary for the practice.
Yes, I have some sympathy for that idea Nick. Except that no other society in South America, in Africa, in Europe, or in China came to such a realization. Or if they did, they were´t willing to expend the effort.
You have a much more detailed knowledge base for the history than I do, but could it be that some cultures used corn more than others? When corn was brought to different places via slave-trade ships (right…?) it became much more popular, and many died because of the b vitamin deficiency it caused. Do we have any way of knowing how much more the society that did nixtamalize ate than the others, because even without a lab, they could have put cause and effect together enough to know that some preparations of this one grain make you feel less energized, cause stomach problems, skin lesions, potentially death, and others have the effect we want from food.
Sorry to be so long replying. Certainly some cultures used corn more than others. We do know that much of the Americas depended very heavily on corn. A lot depends on whether there are accessible alternatives. Pellagra tends to occur when there is no alternative, often because of price. It would be nice to think they put two and two together but we have no evidence that they did.
The problems don’t show up immediately.
I’m back here again, very late, after reading other coments. I think another element is that the wet doughs are all made from grains with no gluten. This sort of addresses Robyn’s early comment.
If you wet gluten-forming proteins in wheat you get tough elastic fibres, They’re the ones that make a structure in wheat (and less strongly in rye) doughs/breads. SO obviously apart from the perishability issue, it’s about the need to keep the gluten dry until it’s used to make a dough. It can be very very strong and tough (just try hand-mixing a wheat flour dough, a soft one, like the pugliese make in places; the strands wrap themselves around your hand).
ALso apart from the bulgur I mentioned, which is a grain storing technique, there’s couscous: wheat or barley dry ground using a quern or equivalent, then the coarser granules tossed with slightly dampened fineer flour to make rounded couscous balls.
In SubSaharan Africa there is couscous made with millet: the millet is pounded in a large mortar (pestle is five feet long, two women pound together alternating with their pestles, in one mortar). It takes ages to get it finely enough ground that there’s enough floury millet, so that millet couscous can be made by hand.
I’ve only seen this in southern Senegal, in the Casamance, where rice is the staple, also cleaned by mortar.
Couldn´t agree more that the gluten in wheat means it´s not good for wet grinding.
I also think pounding grains to make flour is not common, though I could be wrong. Usually pounding is to de-husk or to make broken or flattened grains. For making flour it’s just a whole lot less efficient than the combined lateral and horizontal forces applied during grinding that are very effective at breaking up hard grains.
We’re so far from having to deal with grains that we have to re-discover all these fine distinctions, or so it seems to me.
I am just looking for a well built grinder that I am wanting to grind my einkorn berries
This is the ancient wheat that has less gluten and the husk is stronger intack than the modern wheat growen today in the USA. I like to soak my grains whole and then grind them if that would be better than grinding them in a dry mill, knowing that they have less gluten. Does anyone have any suggestions. Thanks for your input.
Kristina, I don’t have one to recommend at the moment. I too would love to find a reasonably-priced one that would grind wet as well as dry. I’ll try to look into this in the next few days.
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Thanks for this story about grinding grain, Rachel.
Just today, I came across a 4,000-year-old Babylonian recipe for the flatbread bappiru that Yale University recreated. It calls for barley soaked overnight, dried, toasted lightly and then ground.* Add warm water. Ferment 12 hours in the fridge. Shape into “clumps,” sprinkle with salt, then bake. Cool. At this point, Bappiru could be stored for a long time. & coarsely crush.
Meanwhile, make a broth. Lightly cook ground leeks & garlic in sesame oil till aromatic, then add water & salt. Simmer ¾ hour, then add chopped kurrāth or spring onion & cilantro. Simmer another 15 minutes. Coarsely crush the bappiru and scatter it over the broth. Give it a gentle stir, then serve.
For more details, see:
https://babylonian-collection.yale.edu/about/babylonian-cooking
Meanwhile, here’s a story by journalist Ruth Schuster along with writer and editor Elon Gilad at the newspaper Haaretz. They propose that bappiru could be a precursor of matza. They call it “terrible bread” as the low gluten in barley means it barely rises. This suggests that the very poor ate bappiru. Also, there’s proof that the bread was used to brew beer.
Here’s the URL for the story:
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-04-09/ty-article/hard-baked-mythology-and-matza/00000187-4bb7-df9f-a597-6ff78a6f0000
*Note that the barley, after soaking, is dried.
Thanks for sending all these references. I have so much to say about this that it will have to wait for a blog post. Some is right, some is not. We are learning so rapidly about ways of dealing with grains in the past.